Supporting Another Record-Breaking Black Friday and Cyber Monday

I’m happy to report that we have nothing to report. Once again, Couchbase Support was fully prepared to provide immediate, all hands responses to major events over the insanely busy, make-or-break shopping extravaganza known as the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend. We saddled up, went on high alert — only to have been met with absolutely no issues to attend to.

In each of the three years that I have been at Couchbase, we have devised meticulous coverage schedules for the Black Friday long weekend. We ensure that a skeleton crew is staffed during the Thanksgiving Thursday and Friday holidays for U.S. hours. We provide secondary and tertiary resources on an “On Call” basis in case some major event does occur. We carefully schedule Support Management to be fully available throughout the weekend to manage any major event. Finally, we have all of Engineering management on alert if an issue requires that level of assistance.

This planning is obviously not only reassuring to ourselves in that we’re fully ready to be able to provide both rapid and in depth support in case any of our customers encounter a major issue, but perhaps more importantly, it provides significant reassurance to our customers, some of whom include eBay, PayPal, Neiman Marcus, Tesco, Best Buy, Tommy Hilfiger, and Dixon’s Carphone, to name just a few! Each of these accounts use Couchbase in their critical path for customer engagement, and each would suffer damage to both their finances and their brand if they had a major failure or performance degradation over the Black Friday period.

Reflecting on three years of such peace and harmony over these Black Friday periods, I can’t help but think that we should all acknowledge a few things that such solid performance means. It’s a true reflection of the cross collaboration of Engineering, Support and the Field working with our customers to ensure we get it right.

Engineering continues to improve performance, while continuing to provide Couchbase’s very high standard of stability and elasticity in each new version, while delivering a myriad of new capabilities.

Customers can then prepare for peak loads and scale according to those needs with no impact to their production clusters.

Our Field teams work closely with our larger customers coming into the Black Friday season to make sure that the customers are evaluating current capacity and predicted load to ensure cluster readiness.

The Support team does an excellent job of working closely with our customers to ensure that any issues they’re seeing that could have an impact are resolved in advance of the event.

Couchbase is a special company, and the Couchbase team is unmatched in our industry. It’s a privilege to work with such a remarkable team and be able to deliver not just customer delight, but customer euphoria.